Player-2http://www.player-2.nl
Portfolio for Arjen de Jong, freelance game designer and writer.Tue, 10 Oct 2017 09:05:03 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.26Perpetual Musingshttp://www.player-2.nl/?p=945
http://www.player-2.nl/?p=945#commentsMon, 24 Feb 2014 20:24:12 +0000http://www.player-2.nl/?p=945This article isn’t clean cut, it’s more of a sharing of many unfinished thoughts on storytelling and games. I think it’s time to spin some webs amongst those thoughts. I’m always open to discussion, especially on these kinds of articles. The writing that inspired these thoughts to come together is the following by Ian Bogost, and you should definitely read it, especially the last paragraphs.

For a while now I write short articles about writing for games in a series I call ‘Playful Narrative‘. Recently, someone commented on the articles overall, saying I seem to write more about narrative design for games than the actual writing of text for games. There are several reasons for that, the simplest being that my expertise lies a bit more in narrative design than concrete writing. It’s also easier to write more generally applicable tips and tricks on the larger process of designing a narrative than on the details in the writing itself, as many choices in the latter ultimately come down to personal style and preference. The most important reason for me though would be that I feel like games are stuck in a very uncomfortable place of not understanding their own medium when it comes to storytelling1. It’s that last feeling that was struck multiple times when reading Bogosts grand piece mentioned above. Below I will take some time to explore the origin of this issue and expand upon Bogosts thoughts.

I feel like games are stuck in a very uncomfortable place of not understanding their own medium when it comes to storytelling.

Bogost writes about what he dubs the ‘perpetual adolescence’ of game narratives and arguably to a lesser degree of many other popular cultural forms today. This adolescences he describes is characterised by a focus on power fantasies and centre of the universe thinking in stories, forgoing ambiguity, subtlety and nuance in the process. Games more than any other medium focus their narrative around epic action and grand heroic quests rather than the more subtle and nuanced aspects storytelling has to offer. Through this focus, games often miss out on invoking moral dilemmas and ambiguity like good literature, poetry or film does. Moreover, where the epic stories in the latter art forms often tended to strike a balance between tales of power and heroism on the one side and moral questioning and reflection on the other, the stories of most games simply don’t2. Most stories in games are shockingly shallow and one-sided. Bogost illustrates this superficiality strikingly when he speaks of “a steady diet of obliterating hell-spawn and saving kidnapped princesses” while talking about narrative themes in games of the past two decades.

The problem with this perpetual adolescence however is bigger than the big pile of games that don’t even try or pretend to try and address the issue. Taking a look at an example Bogost uses extensively, the ‘Bioshock’ series pretend to tackle moral dilemmas in their narrative but then fail to raise them to be more than a backdrop for their completely unrelated gameplay. This issue has been discussed a lot in light of the term ludonarrative dissonance, but that term focusses too much on the gameplay and too little on the bigger meaning of it all to completely do right to this particular discussion. For it is typical of games that try to expand their narrative qualities to fail hard on matching this with the gameplay. All too often, the two are seen as separable entities and the fact that studios attempt to fix the issue by hiring good content writers rather than good interactive narrative designers is telling. And it isn’t even the failing that is the problem here. It is the widespread denial that this should be labelled as such. Because what does it say about games as a medium when many in the scene consider using frequented themes like war, oppression or other forms of human tragedy as a mere backdrop to tell a flat story centred on heroism and power a good decision? Hollywood wouldn’t be surprised by the method but I wouldn’t be the first to think that this is unbecoming of a good story.

I would be the last to deny that it’s entertaining to watch a Hollywood blockbuster now and then. Few would watch one to look for multi-layered good narrative or powerful dialogue. That is fine, as long as there are good alternatives within the art form that do offer this. ARG designer Adrian Hon spoke in a talk years ago named ‘Why stories in games suck‘3 of the existence of poorly written works (low art) and well written works (high art) in every medium. That is fine, he continued, because for high art to exist, there has to be low art. And most of everything is low art.

Instead of aiming to make high art however, most designers simply don’t care to be in the low art category when it comes to narrative. There aren’t that many well written games out there, yet few in the industry aspire to improve this. Many would deny there is any need to, some going as far as to claim that narrative and writing have no real place in games. And even with Indies on the rise, the scene still looks at our blockbuster designers for guidance and improvement in the narrative direction even though they have proven to be stuck in a clueless gridlock on the matter for quite some time now. Plus, I’d like to give Indies credit for improving a lot of things in the industry, but there are very few of them out there that actually tackle this issue effectively and in the right direction. It says a lot about the medium when the latest Iron Man movie is less black and white than the story of the average game sold. We keep making games with narratives that differ from bad to horrible yet tell each other that ‘it’s ok’ because we still make enjoyable games regardless of this. Sure, there’s the rare storytelling pearl amongst the rusty bottle-caps, but you’ll be fishing for a long time to find it.

We keep making games with narratives that differ from bad to horrible yet tell each other that ‘it’s ok’ because we still make enjoyable games regardless of this.

So why is this? Well, one of the main reasons is the architectural focus point of games; the gameplay. When I need to explain to an outsider what game design is about, I tell them it’s the designing of behaviour. Especially for digital (video)games, the designer is in near full control of the moves the player can and cannot make. Gameplay is about what the player does, the way she can interact with the product. Progress in a game is often paired with more options or moves for the player and an increase in difficulty4. Both give the player more actions to perform and different settings to perform them in. Games focus on interaction and their architecture is designed to serve that rather than a story.

So narrative was made to serve and carry this idea and somewhere along the road most of us decided to keep it that way. We decided that Mario needed to save The Princess not because it was a good story but because it was a simple way to tell the player she had to get from A to B and jump on the bad guys. I’ve heard many theories as to why this evolved the way it did but none of them are conclusive, though the main culprit always seems to be gameplay combined with agency. Gamedesigners want the player to feel in control of everything about the game, to make it as interactive as possible. Interactivity is the holy-grail of gamedesign. On top of that, gamedesigners think in ‘activators’ and ‘targets’, cause and effect. If we need the player to do ‘X’ we need someone or something to tell him ‘Y’. I’ve written about this before with regard to character design (part 1, part 2). This is a very effective method when designing flow in a game but if you don’t make the next steps you’re stuck with some rather bad narrative. The story will basically be a themed in-game instruction manual5.

Let this aspiration go and focus on your own strengths instead.

This nature of games works itself into another nasty problem with stories; we try to make them interactive. While that in itself is not a problem of course, the way we do it often is. First of all, making good interactive narrative is hard. Making good interactive narrative without active management by a gamemaster or writer is even harder. Videogames don’t have an easy road here. While a game with active management like tabletop Dungeons & Dragons requires little more than a qualified storyteller as dungeon master to be fully interactive, videogames would have to code hundreds of options and possibilities to even get close to this amount of freedom6. The holy-grail of storytelling in games has too long been modelled after the holy-grail in games overall: interactivity. But a game’s story doesn’t have to be interactive to be good. And when we try to craft interactive narratives for videogames, we shouldn’t focus too much on borrowing methods from other types of (live)games because live management and endless improvisation are not in the nature of videogames.

What we should do is explore ways to natively tell (interactive) stories with videogames, in a way that suits the medium. We should stop aiming for ways to tell stories that other types of games or even other forms of art are way better at. We can borrow expertise and tricks from our neighbours, but we can’t substitute raising our own storytelling voices and methods with this borrowing. Searching for such a voice won’t be easy and requires good design and a clear vision on both games and storytelling. But it has to happen. The years to come will hopefully be about those brave enough to embark on this quest and join the explorers that are rowing their boats through this vastly unexplored ocean right now.

What we should do is explore ways to natively tell stories with videogames, in a way that suits the medium.

But exploring better ways to tell stories is only one side of the coin. We also need to re-educate our players along with our designers. We’ve taught them over the years that it’s better to act than listen. We’ve told them to shoot or be shot. We’ve trained them to distillate clear targets out of our flavourful text rather than read the text. We’ve raised them to need and want action based power fantasies with black and white objectives rather than nuance and ambiguity. We’ve told them there is only winning or losing, allies or enemies, good or evil. That everything is about progressing rather than being. If we gave them options it was A or B, but usually even the options were superficial or fake. We then told them over and over again they chose A or B even though we forced them. We’ve punished them for thinking rather than acting, for trying to find nuance or exploring different options.

Yet we need to tell them7 there’s more. By serving them more, step by step. We need to expand options for players, explore other ways to allow them to progress than ‘railroading’ them through our stories and lamenting them for choices made along the way that were actually forced upon them. We need to devise better and smarter systems to measure the choices of players and their progress through a story. We need to create meaningful options and better link them to the narrative. We need to find nuance and subtlety in our storytelling. We need to accept gameplay and story can’t be seen as separate entities. We need to give renewed value to logical storylines and credible in-game ecologies.

But above all, we need to acknowledge we can do better, to ourselves and to our players.

————–

Footnotes:

Let me note here for new readers that I don’t think games necessarily always need to have a (good) narrative or every game needs to focus on this. Narrative is also a much broader thing than simply the storyline or plot, it is the culmination of everything you tell with the game, be it through text, sound, visuals or gameplay.

I say tended, for this balance seems lost or at the very least out of focus in the narratives of these art forms as well nowadays. I am unsure whether this is a bigger movement and games are simply flowing with the stream, or if this change of style in narratives for films and books was actually brought about by a pop-culture that copied this from videogame practice. If you look at the literature and films that are hyped today, they tend to overwhelmingly fit the power fantasy description.

The presentation makes a couple very good points, and slide 56 is one to pin to your wall.

As opposed to many narrative structures where options are usually more open at the start and narrow down more and more as the plot and events unfold.

Many games are actually played with guides rather than reading the in-game text that tells you what to do and where to go. This is because designers often create lengthy flavour text (that is often rather random and one-in-a-dozen like) to brush up on the fact that they are actually telling the player to go from A to B or do X with Y. The most ridiculous situations arise when designers subsequently realised that this might leave the player with hazy instructions because of the length and poor nature of the text, so they serve the player summarized ‘do this’, ‘go here’ journals or quest markers to fix the problem they created one step before.

There are of course other design methods and tricks to do things like this in videogames. Most of them require the game to give other players a certain amount of control over the story, and even this can be very difficult and labour-intensive technically but also in design. This is a greatly under-served and unexplored corner of interactive video-game narrative.

And ourselves just as much.

]]>http://www.player-2.nl/?feed=rss2&p=9450Seminar Bovenwijshttp://www.player-2.nl/?p=923
http://www.player-2.nl/?p=923#commentsTue, 04 Feb 2014 14:17:03 +0000http://www.player-2.nl/?p=923This post is about a Dutch event on roleplay and education where I will be speaking. The text below is therefore in Dutch.

]]>http://www.player-2.nl/?feed=rss2&p=9230Credibility mattershttp://www.player-2.nl/?p=828
http://www.player-2.nl/?p=828#commentsSun, 05 Jan 2014 15:59:43 +0000http://www.player-2.nl/?p=828Playful Narrative is a series of short irregularly updated articles each focused around a single lesson or point to remember when writing for games.

Credibility matters

The title above can and should be read in two ways. First, I mean to tell you that credibility matters in all stories you make. Whether they are based on real events, fairy tales or science fiction, credibility is highly important to keep your reader involved with the story and make the narrative stand out in such a way that the reader actually cares about what happens to the characters it involves. I could talk long about the psychological reasons behind this but I believe this will become obvious in due time when we dive into the other way you can read the title above: below is material concerning credibility in stories.

Hey there Lara, what are we killing today?

The issue of credibility in storytelling is very topical in games right now as part of a bigger discussion on games and narratives that has been going on since the term ludonarrative dissonance1 was coined by Clint Hocking to explain why the narrative of the game Bioshock felt strange. Though the issue of credibility differs from that of ludonarrative dissonance the latter may break the first2.

For example, an often heard complaint about storytelling in the FPS-genre (among others) is that the player controlled character kills so many others that he or she can hardly ever not be labelled as a homicidal maniac and that the narrative in these games seems mostly unable to account for this. There are games that attempt to fix this but don’t quite succeed, like the most recent Tomb Raider did. This then sparks discussion about narratives in games and an often made argument from advocates of those games is that credibility doesn’t matter as much in some stories. Yet credibility always matters, a lot.

The mistake here is that these people draw a line between credibility and realism. However, where realism is about whether story elements are realistic and plausible in our real world, credibility of the story world is about whether story elements are realistic in the portrayed world. In a fairytale world it’s completely acceptable that the main character encounters a talking dragon whilst in the woods yet in a Second World War setting, this would be frowned upon to say the least. Whereas in that fairytale world the credibility is broken if soldiers turn up to save the main character and in the other setting it would be fine. Realise that this is just an example, there are as many story worlds as there are stories, and anything is possible. You can make a fairytale world with dragons and World War 2 era soldiers for example, but you can’t just throw around Deus ex Machina’s3 from other story worlds without preparing for it. The key to creating any world is to be consistent and build up to anything that falls out of this norm of consistency so it can still be accepted by the player. Story worlds follow logic4 and any action or object in them must be logically explicable, though this doesn’t always have to be clear right away to the player.

The basic rule here is that whenever you build a story you define the world for yourself as the writer. Define the basic set of laws and logic the world operates in. This set is usually our real world logical set of rules5 with some changes or adaptations to them. That what isn’t changed feels logical and is a given fact for the player because the real world operates in such a way; you don’t need to mention gravity if you don’t change it. The elements that are changed need to be addressed or build up to for them to fit in and create a logical whole. They also need to be meaningful. If you change (usually small) rules but don’t actually make them fit into the world, they will fall out as poor story elements. For example, if the game designer wants characters to be able to carry around lots of gold it feels very cheap if the story explains this by saying gold is a very light material in this world but it subsequently doesn’t elaborate on this (or doesn’t do any explaining in the first place). The key here is to think everything through. If gold is very light, what would that mean for the world at large? Is there anything in our normal world that uses the weight of gold that would be different in this world as a result of this? If you can’t make things fit in in such a way, don’t enforce them but work with the game designer to change them to something that does suit the world at large instead6.

Many games sadly still use ridiculous amounts of in game currency for no reason. This is odd to say the least as one of the first rpg games, the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons had already solved this issue back in the seventies.

Make it general practice to always test every element in your world to this logic and change it if needed. Working in this way will greatly help you create rich and meaningful worlds full of detail where elements have reasons and consequences. Because credibility matters.

This week’s point to remember

Create a set of logical rules in which your world operates and enforce them in every story element. Don’t ever think credibility does not matter for your particular story.

Next time in Playful Narrative: Give the player actual choices.

Whether you totally agree with me or feel like I completely miss the point, let me know in the comments or get in touch! See you next time.

Footnotes:

Ludonarrative dissonance is a rather complex idea but described very shortly it refers to conflicts between a video game’s narrative and its game play.

The main difference here is that ludonarrative dissonance causes disbelief in the overall story of a game and its world, yet credibility in a story can be broken by more things than just ludonarrative dissonance.

Literally, god out of a machine, a term derived from ancient Greek play-writes and used a lot in theatre and storytelling to describe an element that is unexpected or irregular and often used to progress or change the story at a key point

Even story worlds that might seem irrational or absurd do, but they follow their own set of rules that define their logic.

Laws of nature, human psychology etc., be aware though that if you work in a certain genre or it seems like you do, you automatically inherit the most basic laws and logic of that genre too, and you will have to address breaking them if you do.

This is a bit of a poor example, because I would tell anyone that would come to me with this particular issue right away that you can’t build a viable and credible economy when the lowest monetary unit is ‘a gold piece’. This way too often used system gets outright ridiculous when you pay over a 100 gold pieces for simple food or tools, inflation doesn’t even begin to cover this anymore.

]]>http://www.player-2.nl/?feed=rss2&p=8280Build a recap functionhttp://www.player-2.nl/?p=792
http://www.player-2.nl/?p=792#commentsWed, 02 Oct 2013 17:18:36 +0000http://www.player-2.nl/?p=792Playful Narrative is a series of short irregularly updated articles each focused around a single lesson or point to remember when writing for games.

Build a recap function

There is only one reason I’ve never really gotten the hang of playing a Zelda game: I get lost. Not lost in the game world because of routing or other game design issues, no, lost because I’m an irregular player. I pick up a game, play it for a couple of days, then have a busy period and leave the game to pick it up again sometime later. The only problem is, you can’t. Picking up a Zelda game after, say, three weeks, is like waking up in a room you’ve never seen before. You have no clue how you got there, where you were going and what is happening. And Zelda isn’t alone. Adventure games and other story led games are often build with a certain pacing, disregarding the idea that barely anyone finishes a game within a week, leave alone in one solid play session. In some cases this will mean having to backtrack a little to get back into the game, or losing some of the original pacing. In extreme cases though, this means it´s often faster to start the game anew than attempt to backtrack until you get a sense of what you were doing.

If you regularly wake up not remembering what you’ve done the night before and see purple birds, people tend to advice you to stay away from drugs and alcohol. In games, they just call you Link and give you a sword to save a princess.

Because games don’t allow the player to read back like they would in a book, there is no ´previously on…´ like within a tv-series and they aren’t completed in one session like a movie, they have a serious need for a recap function. Players are going to get back to your game after not playing for hours, days, weeks or even months, so you’d better prepare for it. These other media forms suggest a couple of solutions, though ‘reading back’ into a game by some form of diary or even watching such a device through cutscenes in the form of a ‘previously on’ isn’t very elegant. Not least because besides the general storyline, the player will want to backtrack on very specific details like ‘which doors did I already open’ and ‘what was this weird item for again’.

There’s always wisdom to be borrowed though, in this case from the soap. Soaps are possibly not what comes to mind first when you think of writing and narrative design, but there are many narrative devices and tricks in this genre that you can learn from as a writer. One of them is what I call the ‘drive-by recap’, it’s a quick and elegant way of recapping vital information exactly when it becomes relevant, without a need for active backtracking. It goes like this: Whenever something resurfaces in the story, a character recaps the most vital bits of information about it in dialogue that is in line with the overall story1. For example, old character Jimmy calls after having been absent from the story for an entire season. The dialogue that follows would be along these lines:

Character 1: Who’s that?
Character 2: (While answering the phone, whispers) Jimmy
Character 1: Jimmy?! You mean the one who you-
Character 2: – Yes the one I used to date before I was with Bob.
Character 1: But he hasn’t called you all year?
Character 2: No, he was serving in Iraq
Etc.

This immediately gives new viewers the most vital information about the character Jimmy and his relation to other characters while recapping this for regular followers of the show, all packed away in natural dialogue.

This of course requires some skill to translate to the narrative of a game, but that isn’t all too hard once you get the hang of it. It can’t be done with everything, but it is a very useful trick to recap on events, characters, items and other aspects with narrative significance. What you’re left with then is everything you can file under the category ‘doors and keys’: aspects of the game that are somewhat insignificant to the story and as such can’t be recapped through it, but are very important for the gameplay. This category can be solved in a multitude of ways, the most important guideline here is that these aspects are not story related and shouldn’t be made as such just for the purpose of recapping information2. These fixes will always be very game and style specific, aiming most of all to bridge the gap that falls in the usual routing when a playing session is interrupted and continued later.

This week’s point to remember

Build a recap function in your game, to recap the narrative and to support the routing.

Next time in Playful Narrative: Credibility matters

Whether you totally agree with me or feel like I completely miss the point, let me know in the comments or get in touch! See you next time.

Footnotes:

And as such does not noticeably break it up or ‘pause’ it.

Some examples of fixing these would be maps that mark visited areas or points of interest, characters mentioning information like ‘I think I’ve been here before’ when opening already visited areas, or adding notes or examine functions to items in the inventory of the player that explain their relevance at that point in the game.

]]>http://www.player-2.nl/?feed=rss2&p=7920Dutch Larp Platform bijeenkomst 11-09http://www.player-2.nl/?p=793
http://www.player-2.nl/?p=793#commentsThu, 29 Aug 2013 14:25:40 +0000http://www.player-2.nl/?p=793By lack of a better place to host this in the initial set up phases of this initiative, I’ve hosted this information here to be able to show it on a publicly accessible location. The text below is in Dutch.

]]>http://www.player-2.nl/?feed=rss2&p=7930Weave your storyhttp://www.player-2.nl/?p=596
http://www.player-2.nl/?p=596#commentsThu, 15 Aug 2013 14:32:01 +0000http://www.player-2.nl/?p=596Playful Narrative is a series of short weekly articles each focused around a single lesson or point to remember when writing for games.

Weave your story

When you are weaving a cloth, you want to be careful not to get too many loose ties, for it would turn out raffled and fall apart quickly. On the other hand you also don’t want to use too few strings, for this would make it look bad and weak. Stories need to be woven in an equal fashion; if you leave too many loose ties in your plot it will feel like parts of the story are missing or it doesn’t add up. If you use too few strings however your story will feel predictable, unrealistic and without depth.

In principle games as a medium excel at multi-thread story telling. They are able to give players a lot of control over how much of the story they take in, allowing them to add a lot of supportive narrative just for the players that enjoy this, yet feature a strong clean-cut main plotline for the players that don’t1. Add to this the wide array of tools that can be used to tell the narrative with audio, visuals or text, through active dialogue, world design, gameplay and much more and games are a medium well fit to tell an intricately woven story. In reality though, games often seem to struggle with getting a grip on this.

Players want to feel like they are discovering a story rather than it being told to them. Look at them as if they’re Sherlock Holmes.

There is no trick to getting this right, other than just doing it2. Spreading out narrative and information throughout your world instead of focussing it all into key points will make the story feel more realistic and creative3. Way too often games try to force an abundance of information and plot into a single conversation or cutscene, usually because this is easiest to produce4, forcing players to undergo lengthy interruptions of gameplay to watch or read boring monologues5. The problem here is that putting so much plot in a small timeframe forces you to write some sort of a summary of part of your story to fit it all in there. Summaries don’t make for exciting reading6. The reason for this is that there is no chance to build up suspense, excitement, wonder and surprise, no place for style and nuance. There is no time for the player to fantasize about the gaps in the story and make her own theories. Essentially the player hears the story instead of experiencing it. Furthermore, spreading important plot elements around different parts of the narrative can make piecing together the story a game in itself, something at which the Alternate Reality genre excels.

So next time you write a story for your game, spread it out, weave it like an elegant rich piece of cloth. “Hide” your plot amongst a multitude of dialogues, events and information. Enable the player to discover it all and truly experience your story7.

This week’s point to remember

Weave your plot over a multitude of threads.

Next week in Playful Narrative: Build a recap function

Whether you totally agree with me or feel like I completely miss the point, let me know in the comments or get in touch! See you next week.

Footnotes:

One of the more straightforward ways to do this is to add a lot of side story and extra lore in the game that clearly doesn’t have to be read/discovered to understand the main storyline and play the game. Games in the MMO and RPG genres do this a lot, but most triple-A titles sadly lean to a less refined and poorly executed form of this as well. This method is implemented best however when these bits of extra story, however optional, give the player an edge in the game or a deeper experience of the gameplay, as I’ve illustrated in this earlier post.

It’s a basic skill in creative writing that I really can’t explain in a 600-800 words blogpost.

This is in particular true for adventure games, which are often build on a mystery style plot based on spread out clues that need to be discovered by the player. The wider spread the pieces are the more rewarding and entertaining piecing together the whole will be. Moreover it will feel more like an achievement to solve a mystery if it truly had to be pieced together rather than just pursued for long enough through the gameplay for it to solve itself.

Any producer that forces this down deserves a slap in the face. I’d rather even play a game with only half of a good and well built story than one with a fully fledged shadow of what could’ve been a good story.

Possibly the worst version of this practice is where the villain a player just defeated explains all the missing plot elements together with half of the story in what I call a ‘darn-I’ve-been-defeated-speech’. It’s terribly boring to watch and hints at a lack of creative writing or a strong mess-up in the execution of the planned narrative. It’s like a writer noticing on the final page of his book that he still has to jam two thirds of his plot in there somewhere.

If you doubt this statement, instead of picking up your next book on your to read list, go ahead and find yourself some 20 summaries of very good books instead.

For those that still doubt why this works, I’m assuming you’ve at least at one time been in the situation where you follow links on wikipedia on and on until you’ve read half your night away? Curiosity is a strong force when following stories, and discovering new bits of information that add to the bigger picture can keep you satisfied for a long time. If it works on a digital encyclopedia it will most certainly work for a skillfully crafted narrative.

]]>http://www.player-2.nl/?feed=rss2&p=5960Define the role of the playerhttp://www.player-2.nl/?p=736
http://www.player-2.nl/?p=736#commentsMon, 29 Jul 2013 13:54:38 +0000http://www.player-2.nl/?p=736Playful Narrative is a series of short weekly articles each focused around a single lesson or point to remember when writing for games.

Define the role of the player

Last Playful Narrative, I talked about how the main character and the player are rarely ever the same. This week I will guide you along the most frequently used roles for players in a game1. This will not be an exclusive collection, but rather a basis to work from when designing. It could be you need to combine two or more of these perspectives to get the one you are looking for, or design something entirely different.

The player is like a ghost possessing the main character: This allows the player into the characters body but not his head. Often used in adventures and other linear types of videogames, it gives the player a certain amount of control over the actions of the character but keeps her guessing about what goes on in its mind. In these narratives the events of the present often have roots in past events that need to be unfolded at certain points in the story2. Games with this perspective are often about uncovering these past events to assemble the plot. They use a lot of flashbacks and can also feature dialogue between the main character and the player, even though the player is rarely ever defined or directly mentioned. Lastly, the player occasionally has a different view than the character would, sometimes for the game in its entirety and sometimes only for specific scenes.

Ashley nails it: there is no such thing as memories when it comes to game characters3.

The player is some form of subconscious of the main character: Different from the ghost role in the physical aspect, this perspective usually gives the player no direct control over the actual actions of the main character. All the player can do is manipulate its thoughts and choices and in that way influence the outcome of actions and events. It is often the opposite of the ghost perspective; where that perspective gives the player mostly physical control to manipulate the immaterial parts of a story, here, the player controls the immaterial aspects (thought, memory, decisions) to manipulate the physical part of the story (actions, events). Because of its tricky and intense storytelling nature, this perspective is used less often.

The player is a background character: This perspective is used quite often, but mostly without designers actually realizing it4 The player generally only knows what characters tell him, either in witnessed dialogues between characters or between the player and one character. She can however get additional information through personal actions or background story handed to her via a narrator.

The player is a manager: Used a lot in RPGs and other games where the player manages multiple characters. The player can be a background character herself, but could also be a godlike being that manages things without the characters acknowledging it. She could even be seen as a narrator in this role, manipulating the story and adding to it herself when she sees fit. The player typically has a top down perspective and can access most conversations between characters and even inner dialogue in some cases.

The player roleplays herself: This is mostly applicable to Alternate Reality Games and other types of live games, but also true for many board and card games. The player plays the game without enacting a character, rather, she is herself in the reality of the game world. There is a fine distinction between roleplaying yourself and being yourself; the game-version of a person can perform actions and have motives that are legitimate and accepted within the game, but would not be perceived in such a way outside of the game. Actions performed within a game often bear a different meaning within that game than they normally would.5. As mentioned last week this perspective comes closest to the idea of the player being the main character.

The player roleplays a character: This perspective is mostly used in roleplaying games6. The player will be allowed to create a character within a certain framework or granted the freedom to complement a ready made character. If the player has motives that differ from the character’s she is generally expected to act upon those of the character rather than her own. Giving the player this role however also requires the game to facilitate roleplay as the main form of gameplay: if the enacting of the character does not matter and is not rewarded the player will carry out her own motives rather than those of the character. For this to work, the game will have to offer a great deal of freedom. The player greatly influences the character and will often project traits of herself onto the character both knowingly and not7.

So now that you have a list of some of the most used player roles, actively define them next time you create a game, at least for yourself as the designer. It will help you craft sensible dialogue and be in control of your aesthetic distance. But most of all, acknowledging and understanding how perspective and player placement works in games is one of the first steps on a path of telling better stories through games. Understanding perspective is one of the basics of good writing and games have evaded getting a grasp on this for far too long.

This week’s point to remember

There are many different perspectives in games. Understanding them gives you the skills to frame your story and control your aesthetic distance.

Next week in Playful Narrative: Weave your story

Whether you totally agree with me or feel like I completely miss the point, let me know in the comments or get in touch! See you next week.

Footnotes:

Many games out there have ‘broken’ perspectives in the sense that they try to let the player be the main character. When practising perspective in games, it is good practice to take a game you’ve played and think out which perspective the player really has in this (and whether the designers acknowledged that).

Often, games give the main character some sort of amnesia so they can wrongly pretend the player is in fact the main character, this in fact has been done so much that it has become kind of a cliché in game writing.

In the game Another Code, you supposedly are main character Ashley. Yet if you would be, Ashley would be constantly talking to herself and ask herself to perform simple tasks and move conversations forward. Many games work themselves into these bizarre situations by pretending the player is the main character when it is clear she is not.

Resulting in the player being a background character, but that character never being mentioned or taken into account by the designers.

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson attributes this phenomenon to a difference in ‘keying’:“The statement ‘This is play’ looks something like this: These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote.”

It is not applicable to roleplaying videogames because the term has come to stand for something else in that genre and these games aren’t about traditional roleplaying.

Even experienced roleplayers that know they do so often face great difficulty playing a character not at least partly influenced by their own character traits as this requires some very solid acting and writing skills.

]]>http://www.player-2.nl/?feed=rss2&p=7360Scrum Pokerhttp://www.player-2.nl/?p=708
http://www.player-2.nl/?p=708#commentsFri, 19 Jul 2013 11:18:19 +0000http://www.player-2.nl/?p=708Scrum poker1 is a great tool for planning complex projects and can even be used beyond that to have everyone’s voice be heard in meetings. Back when I was working on my graduation project at the HKU, I used it for planning and early development. To be able to do so I searched the web for ways to acquire a set of cards known as a scrum deck2 but could not find any reasonably priced and well-made decks available in the Netherlands (nor in Western Europe for that matter). What I did find though were a lot of ways to print your own cards. So I quickly whipped together some images and had a couple of decks printed. Since then I’ve been asked a couple of times how I acquired these cards and if I still can. Well, here they are. For those familiar with scrumming, scroll right down for the files and have them printed to your preferences.

Scrum Poker

Scrum poker is a way to plan a project by breaking it down into its smallest assets and planning those in a relative fashion to determine more precisely how much time each facet will take. This can regularly be used to create or update a planning before or during production, but often you can already start using it in the late concepting face of the product. The benefit of doing so is that by breaking down your concept into the small assets that will be going to form it you flesh it out and get a stronger grasp on what it is you’re making. In this way you can link late concepting to planning and start your production phase with a more realistic view.

Does that sound good? Let’s get started then. First of all, a scrum deck consists of 52 cards divided into 4 equal sets of 13 cards and is thus suited to be used by 4 people. If you want to play with more than 4 people, you need more decks. Since this method works well if everyone on the team is involved, it is wise to get at least 2 decks for standard use. Besides the team members who will play and take part in the discussions it can be good to get a moderator who does not partake himself3.

Every set of cards is a sequence of numbers plus an infinite mark and a question mark4. The cards typically feature numbers alike the Fibonacci sequence with an added 0 at the start, resulting in the following 13 cards per set: 0,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,∞,? The reason for using the Fibonacci sequence is that the higher the numbers get the bigger the gap between two cards will be. This reflects the fact that the bigger an estimate is, the more uncertainty is involved. If a player estimates something to be a 10, she is forced to rethink and find that some of the perceived uncertainty does not exist and play an 8, or account for the uncertainty in her estimate and play a 13. This is also the reason I used the ‘rough’ numbers and did not round of the higher values like some decks do, because that gives the false notion of a high number being well rounded and thus a clean estimate while it is not.

Once every team member has a set of cards, the moderator determines what part of the project will be used as the smallest unit, meaning that it takes the least time to achieve. For the building of a website for example, this may be registering the web address. This will be the ’1′. It is vital that the members talk in units and not in hours or minutes, because this will get them to think alike when playing5. This is because humans are actually very bad at planning time and saying something will take “an hour or so” can result in it taking anywhere between 15 minutes and a day. Thinking in the smallest unit when estimating other assets will stimulate active consideration of the task, where thinking in hours would provoke a thoughtless estimate.

Once the unit has been determined and the cards have been dealt, the actual planning begins. Usually, the team leader will not yet have listed all the assets that need to be build, so she (or the product owner) begins by sketching a user scenario for the project. During this sketch the team determines step by step what will be needed to facilitate the usage6. Once those assets have been determined and written down for each desirable user scenario, a round will be played for each asset. Try to break assets down into the smallest workable parts, the smaller you make them, the better they can be estimated7.

Playing a round

At the start of a round, the moderator shortly introduces the asset, making sure it’s clear for everyone around the table what it is about. All the players pick a card in their hand and put it face down in front of them. Once everyone has chosen their card, the cards will be turned simultaneously and the moderator gives a soapbox to people with high or low estimates (compared to the others). When given a soapbox, a person will offer a quick insight as to why she made this estimate. Do this until a middle ground is met in the group, the estimate doesn’t necessarily have to be a number on card, it can be in between two cards. There may be special scenarios:

A question mark is played. This means that either the asset is not clear enough, or the player playing the question mark has truly no idea how long it will take to produce this asset. The moderator generally gives the player playing a question mark the first speaking opportunity to explain why it was played.

An infinite is played. This means the player playing it estimates the asset to be so big or complicated it could take forever to make or may even be impossible. This should result in a discussion about the asset, its meaning in the project and whether it is realistic. It could be that the asset has not been broken down quite enough. If the team finds this to be the case, they will go about doing that on the spot and then play a round for every new asset.

One or more people make very high estimates. Just like with the infinite this could mean the asset needs to be broken down into smaller assets first. It could however also mean it’s simply something that will take up a lot of time.

A zero is played. This usually means someone thinks the task will take no time at all. It could be the asset already exists, or is not needed for the project. It could however also mean the smallest unit wasn’t picked correctly. In this case make the estimate in halves or quarters of the smallest unit rather than redefining it, unless you run into this problem a lot.

Write down every final conclusion of an estimate to be used later in the finalisation of the planning by the team leader. The estimates will however often deliver more than just that, which is the beauty of this method. Make notes of useful points in the discussions and be sure to work iterative; if you stumble upon something while playing like a missing asset or a previously unknown dependency between assets, directly apply it to your list and play an extra round when needed.

Some tips and remarks

Like said before, it is vital to involve everyone in this process, even people that only do part-time tasks. This often helps your team to discover assets the usual production lead might not have considered.

This method is excellent when working with people that are not yet very adjusted to other team members, because it gives the product owner and team leader a clear view of how long those people feel certain tasks may take8. This is especially useful when planning for disciplines that are unfamiliar to the team leader.

Scrum poker excels for usage in dynamic (creative) projects that don’t have a clear precedent or common practice to fall back on when making planning estimates.

If somewhere in the project you discover new assets that are required, add features or need to scrap some, be sure to get back around the table and scrum for the changes.

It is not so much the estimated number as the team-wide discussion about that estimate that is the fruit of this method.

This method is very suited for usage in teams where people would normally tend to anchor their points a lot towards certain members due to seniority or experience of those people, because the estimates are made known all at once.

The files

Below are two files, the images are jpg’s with the dimensions that are often requested by Dutch card-printing companies. If you need to edit the size or look of the images, download the psd’s instead and have your way with them.

Copyrights: The images have been made by me, with use of the font ‘OCR A Extended’. I was unable to find the copyrights for this font, if restrictions exist and you claim to be the rightful owner of this font and take offence to this usage, please contact me. These images are distributed for free by me for personal use only. Please do not redistribute them without my permission, or make money by selling the digital files or printed versions of this deck. Adaptations are allowed for personal use.

If you have any questions or want help learning scrum poker, feel free to get in touch. If you want to thank me for making this guide and these files available, hire me to teach you the tricks and trades of scrum poker or link me up to another type of project.

Of course I could have written the required cards on some paper and worked with that, but there is something a crisp set of cards brings that a stack of marked paper does not.

Since it is good to get every team member involved and many teams will not have someone available to moderate from outside the team, the moderating can be done by the team leader or product owner instead, who will in this case also play.

There are decks out there though which use different symbols or numbers.

When working with a group that is new to scrum poker, it is generally a good idea to forbid words like minute, hour and day in the conversation altogether.

This works for apps and games and the like, but by stretching up the definition of user scenario a bit, any project can be asserted in this way.

If applicable to your project, this is a good moment to define dependency as well. Doing so will help you throughout the project to manage the planning and scrap assets ( and with that features) during the project if needed without encountering unforeseen relations between assets when doing so.

If the team works with a writer for the first time for example, in a situation without scrum poker, the team leader might make the estimates for his tasks and completely over or underestimate the time certain tasks may take. Even if the team leader has previous experience with the discipline and knows how long she wants something to take, you’d rather hear the writer say a task takes him longer when planning than during production

]]>http://www.player-2.nl/?feed=rss2&p=7080The player is not the main characterhttp://www.player-2.nl/?p=666
http://www.player-2.nl/?p=666#commentsMon, 01 Jul 2013 14:54:19 +0000http://www.player-2.nl/?p=666Playful Narrative is a series of short weekly articles each focused around a single lesson or point to remember when writing for games.

The player is not the main character

One of the more important decisions to make in the early design of the game narrative1, is the perspective and role of the player2. Often though, designers leave themselves an uncertainty by not clearly defining this. This is painfully noticeable in uneasy dialogue and other work-arounds3 in the narrative of many games.

Many of you may think I’m wrong, you may think most games clearly define the role of the player: it’s the main character. This however, is not true. Unless the game is a live game where the player plays herself in a game world4 or a game without any characters at all, the player is not the main character. Let me clarify that: If I read a Harry Potter book, I’m not Harry Potter. I see the world (mostly) through his eyes, get a fair share of his thoughts and emotions, but this does not make me him. Why? Because often Harry Potter feels things or has plans I’m simply left guessing about until he actually enacts them. And most of all, Harry Potter does all sorts of things I would never do. This division seems clear to most people because we’re talking about a book; safe from writing my own version or kidnapping J.K. Rowling, I have no means of influencing Harry’s actions.

No Harry, what are you doing? The other girl. Harry… Oh whatever.

Now if this were a game, I would likely have a means of influencing many of his actions. This has boundaries however, and games will always have these boundaries. The player can’t do whatever she likes, but must abide by the rules of the game and by the limitations of its form5. This results in the game being required to fill in a lot of choices, actions and thoughts for the main character or cut them down in amount and significance because other options are simply not possible or undesired. As such, the player only influences the main character, she does not fully control him. Often, the main character does and feels things that take the player by surprise. Sometimes, this doesn’t really matter. In a game with no real choices and little to no dialogue, the role of the player might as well be left vague6.

But when this is not the case, not defining the role of the player in the narrative often leaves that narrative with weird and crippled dialogue and empty main characters7. Why is this such a problem? Well, it leads gamedesigners to leave the character influenced by the player as vague and nondescript as possible, because in doing so, the player will less often encounter a discrepancy between herself and the character and as such the lie of being the character is kept alive as much as possible. One cannot however write dialogue for an empty character that is not allowed to say much, if anything at all (read more on that here). And without an interesting and multidimensional main character, there is no moral conflict, no drama, no identification between player and character and as such, no story (read more on that here). So now that you know why you have to define the role of the player, read next week’s Playful Narrative to learn more about doing that.

This week’s point to remember

The player is not the main character. It is fundamental to understand this division and define the role of the player in relation to the main character and the rest of the narrative.

Next week in Playful Narrative: Define the role of the player

Whether you totally agree with me or feel like I completely miss the point, let me know in the comments or get in touch! See you next week.

Footnotes:

Not just for games; books need to be written in a style requiring knowledge of the perspective of the reader, movies need to be shot and sometimes narrated from a certain angle.

Note that I often use the worth ‘role’ rather than ‘perspective’. The two have different meanings: perspective is mostly used to describe stories told through a certain viewpoint, where role can be used to imply that the reader/player is an acknowledged part of the storyworld, as is often the case in games. A role defines the perspective, but is more than just that.

Some examples of work-arounds would be having dialogue always revolve around things that have already taken place, or are of a trivial nature. Or giving the player freedom to form her own answer to a question but rather than actually doing something with the reply, responding in a way that is an acceptable response in case of the most likely answers. (Yes, just like they do in Dora the Explorer).

And yes, those games exist, but they’re rare.

For example, in a videogame, I can often not write any line I want to to reply to dialogue. In a live game, I could, but I wouldn’t be able to fight a dragon as they’re rather hard to come by. Every (plat)form has its boundaries.

These games tend to not define characters very strongly in the first place.

The RPG genre struggles with this most of all. Founded upon the idea that the player role-plays the main character(s), digital games weren’t actually able to live up to that promise. This false premise has lingered though and found its way into genres that have evolved from the RPG as well, like the MMORPG.

]]>http://www.player-2.nl/?feed=rss2&p=6660Death to monologueshttp://www.player-2.nl/?p=641
http://www.player-2.nl/?p=641#commentsWed, 19 Jun 2013 12:48:43 +0000http://www.player-2.nl/?p=641Playful Narrative is a series of short weekly articles each focused around a single lesson or point to remember when writing for games.

Death to monologues

This week’s point is mostly focused on videogames, who of all game genres commit themselves the most to the malpractice of writing entire stories in monologues. MMORPG’s are notoriously good at doing this, in fact, their average in game texts are so bad that most of them have build in ways for players to skip them altogether. If you look at any other form of writing, you’ll see that almost none of them use exclusively monologues. I think this writing origins more from a lack of knowledge and understanding about the place of the player in the story and how to write for a game to begin with, than from an actual choice of style. It has however worked itself up to being the primary writing style for videogames and it’s about time it stopped being that1.

Why? Well, first of all, no one talks in monologues all the time. Therefore, it is completely unbelievable that in your game, almost everyone would. Secondly, it makes the character that is listening to this completely flat and honestly quite weird, because who listens to the most ridiculous types of monologues and says nothing at all? Thirdly, dialogues have more dynamic, pacing, development, options (if you wish to make things interactive) and are usually way more interesting2. As a rule of thumb, use dialogues unless you have a very strong reason to use monologues. Do not use it as your standard style of text but as a conscious choice.

Do use a monologue…:

When using traditional one way communication channels in your game, like letters, tv, video etc.

When the character speeches. (Classic speeches, but also mission briefings for example.)

When the character has an inner monologue. (Also known as a soliloquy, these are very rare. Also, no other character should be present here, inner monologues are aimed at the audience, not at other characters.)

When the character is talking directly to the audience (player) and not to another character3. This is a meta technique and should be used consciously.

Do not use a monologue…:

In any other situation, most of all when two or more characters are standing face to face and should be having a dialogue, if anything.

If what you would tell in a monologue could also be written as a dialogue.

Grey area:

When the lines that are said are short and of such nature that they could be met with silence or an action4.

Having trouble not using monologues? Many game designers and writers don’t know how to write dialogues for games because they haven’t defined one of the two characters involved in most conversations: the one played by the player. I will elaborate on this next week.

This week’s point to remember

Try not to write in monologues, unless you have a strong reason to do so.

Next week in Playful Narrative: Define the role of the player

Whether you totally agree with me or feel like I completely miss the point, let me know in the comments or get in touch! See you next week.

Footnotes:

Note that again, as with most of my posts, I don’t feel like every game should live up to these standards. Some games don’t need a (good) story or well written text and that’s absolutely fine

There are monologues that have most of these qualities too, but they belong to the absolute best of monologues ever written. Even these only work that well because they have been situated in the bigger story very well.

Note that the character the player controls is a character in itself and not the player. More on this next week

Examples are: Short commands or requests like ‘Get up, we need to …’, or simple taunts or sneers the other character may just ignore. This is a broad category and requires practice and insight. The best rule of thumb here is to just decide if it would feel natural that there is no textual reply in the situation. If it does, it is probably fine to go with it.